Dear Wikimedians,
We are changing our engineering processes to improve how we engage with you -- our valued contributors and editors -- around software development.
We are beginning with the collaborative buildout and deployment of VisualEditor. We are moving community engagement processes and product decisions into earlier stages of development, and making them iterative. In a perfect world this process would start prior to feature development, but in this case VisualEditor is already in-flight, so your participation now is critical. With your participation, we can work together to ensure this new process works.
In this new process, we commit to:
• Collectively identify success criteria for each target audience, from new editors (simple feature set) to expert editors (complex feature set). • Ensure success criteria represents the quantified and qualified goals. The feature will only be shipped when the success criteria is met. • Enable the feature for only portions of specific audiences that would best benefit (a process known as “incremental roll-out”) at a time. • Triage and prioritize all bugs and feature requests on a weekly basis to ensure they are addressed in a timely fashion. Publicly post responses, assessment, and target implementations. This will replace the RFP process and ensure we are tracking on all requested features efficiently.
How you can engage:
• Report bugs or enhancement requests in Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/visualeditor/ • Join any of the weekly triage meetings to nominate a release blocker. Please see the instructions at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:VisualEditor/Portal • Participate in development. You can find the team on IRC in the #mediawiki-visualeditor channel on irc.freenode.net.
We are excited to get this long-standing feature to the level of quality and success we all want and need. It is a collective effort. You are not only a stakeholder, but an active contributor in this work. We want to all to be proud of the outcome. Please participate now.
All my best,
Damon
— Damon Sicore VP of Engineering Wikimedia Foundation [email protected]